The Promise of Jobs: Blackmail and Environmental Justice in Flint, Michigan, 1991–1995

Abstract

Abstract In the early 1990s, Flint, Michigan residents faced an uncertain future as urban decay, rising rates of unemployment, and factory closures threatened their livelihoods. Political and business elites proposed siting dirty industries like the Genesee Power woodwaste incinerator in an overwhelmingly-poor and African American section of the city to encourage employment and economic growth. Despite the lofty, and often unfounded, promises of these elites, ordinary residents organized to resist the siting of the incinerator, citing the health threats that would compound the already-dangerous levels of environmental hazards in which they resided, decried the lack of public participation in the decision making, and pointed out what they saw as the clear targeting of their neighborhood because of their race and class status. Residents and their allies, including the St. Francis Prayer Center and the NAACP-Flint chapter attempted to work through the Environmental Protection Agency to shut down the incinera...